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Comment by em500 | Hacker News Reader

Some economists / sociologists classify this as low-trust/high-trust societies. In low-trust societies, trust typically does not extend far beyond family and personal connections. There's nothing Islamic about it: low-trust is more or less synonymous with low- to middle income societies, with the majority non-Islamic (China, India, Latin America).

High-trust is largly "Western" (North America, Western/Norhern Europe, Oceania), but also the rich Asian countries (Japan, South Korean, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore). The causal relationship between high-trust and high-income is difficult to disentangle, but there's plausibly some form of positive feedback loop at work.

I'm not sure what you have in mind with "arise for no reason". Both historically and presently by population-majority, low-trust society seem the norm and high-trust the exeption.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_trust_and_low_trust_socie...

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> The causal relationship between high-trust and high-income is difficult to disentangle, but there's plausibly some form of positive feedback loop at work.

I've read that the rule of law has something to do with it. E.g.: "Where civil liberties and property rights are secure under a strong rule of law, fewer social resources are up for political grabs and groups have less opportunity to benefit via zero-sum or negative-sum competition against other groups."

https://www.oecd.org/innovation/research/1825662.pdf

While I mostly agree, I thought Japan is meant to be notorious for corruption? A very different type, of course: not handing in used notes to a tax official, but rather high-level, white-glove type thing. Like, making sure the state turns a blind eye to safety failings at a nuclear plant.

Maybe there is another dimension than low/high trust?

The low/high trust distinction for many writers (e.g., Fukuyama in Trust) isn't primarily about trust in government to be uncorrupt (or even societal trust in government more generally), but rather about a shared consensus about social rules that facilitates reliable, predictable interpersonal cooperation. e.g., A person can trust that if they enter into an agreement with someone else, there's a likelihood that person will perform without a third party outside of the agreement interposing themselves and insisting on a bribe, and if they don't perform, there's a set of neutral rules (e.g., the courts) to resolve the dispute that again don't require exogenous pressures like bribes or influence from powerful family members. Basically less uncertainty, that in turn creates less unnecessary economic friction. Japan satisfies this definition of a high trust society. Trusting that the government can't be bribed is an aspect of the high/low trust concept, but it's not really the core.

And, of course, trust is having a crisis. Witness the Bitcoin crowd, and their distrust of the FED and other political institutions.

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